Je t'aime à La Folie, By Michael Wright

What started off as a column in the Daily Telegraph spawned C'est La Folie (2006), Michael Wright's bestselling account of leaving London for a lone existence in rural France, and has now led to this second book of La Folie adventures.

If the last one could be summaried as "city-type marooned amid French bucolia", this one would follow: "aforementioned city-type, still marooned, but now looking for love".

His yearning to share this rural idyll with "une copine" lands Wright in overcrowded literary territory normally reserved for female singletons.

Yet Wright wins over a begrudging reader, with writerliness and wit: his bickering hens, his belligerent cat and the emotions that this vast, lonely landscape elicits, described with a heartfelt exuberance.